


Sharp Love

by NeitherEverNorNever



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blood, Other, Police, Statement Fic (The Magnus Archives), Trigger warnings:, also little a jontim as a treat, gossiping/rumors, implied sexual encounter, like seriously there's a lot of blood in this
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-06
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:48:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24574072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeitherEverNorNever/pseuds/NeitherEverNorNever
Summary: Statement of Valerie Carpenter regarding the mysterious circumstances of her friend's murder.
Relationships: Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	Sharp Love

ARCHIVIST 

Statement of Valerie Carpenter, regarding the mysterious circumstances of her friend’s murder. Original statement given the 9th of January, 2015. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, head archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

Look, my mom asked me to do this, so please forgive me if I’m a little sparse on the details. I also think that _she_ might be following me, so I hope you have good security in this place. I hopefully won’t be here for long.

I’m aware that I’m a gossip. I’m not ashamed of how I turned out, I don’t thrive on drama, and I sure don’t talk about “spilling tea” or whatever the kids say these days. I just find out about things because people trust me with their secrets. I would just flash a nice smile, lean in, and they would spill anything that came to mind. If it wasn’t so weirdly fascinating I would find the whole thing disgusting. I could tell you about Francine’s secret life as a pornography writer or how Chuck’s cheating on Samantha because he thinks she’s too high-maintenance. People just dumped their life stories at my feet whenever I gave them a look, and that’s how I became the town gossip in Swindon.

One of my greatest friends is Sabina Ganem. She is…er, was my best friend, if I ever had one. She’d come and have a chat with me every Friday evening at the coffee house after she got back from prayers. We’d just talk about what weird thing she heard about at work. She was a communications director for a small fashion start-up in town, and every day she’d have to have conversations over the internet with models all around the world looking for work. I could fill books with the odd things she’d overheard during those conversations.

But what I found odd was that she never talked about her family life. She lived at home with her parents, as she hadn’t gotten married yet and the family was heavily religious. Her father was an antique bookseller, and that meant that she had access to old copies of pretty much every book her father could get his hands on. Her mother stayed at home and cared for her and her younger brothers…I can’t remember their names or if she’d only ever mentioned them as her brothers. 

This meant it was quite a surprise when I heard that she was in a relationship. The second surprise came when she said it was a woman she was in the relationship with. Just figured that she had her eye on guys, was all. I made sure to tell her how much I supported her, because that’s what friends are for, right?

Sabina’s new girlfriend was named Rebecca; I never found out her last name. She was young, white, and liked wearing oversize tee-shirts and cargo pants. Coming from a fashion designer, I immediately asked why she would have been attracted to someone with such clear disregard for the rules of good dress. She said she didn’t know, said that something clicked when she was around Rebecca. Like they were two halves of a beautiful whole, or something poetic like that. I scoffed at the time, but the way Sabina talked about Rebecca made me wish I had something like that.

Everything went downhill about two weeks later. She hadn’t been at the coffee house after prayers like she usually was the week before, claiming that she had gone out to visit Rebecca. It had been their one month anniversary, she said, but she was clearly shaken by something else. I asked her what was the matter, and she told me everything.

Rebecca loved Broadway musicals to death. It was her life, Sabina told me, and there were posters across her entire room at her parents’ place. So Sabina wanted to get her a gift for their one month anniversary that would be a way of showing her appreciation for Rebecca’s interests. She eventually settled on an old copy of the penny dreadful that the Sweeney Todd musical was based on. Her father had just received it in a shipment from an old European collector who had recently passed away, and she begged her father to give it to her friend as a gift. Apparently this was how her family found out that she had been seeing Rebecca, and they didn’t take kindly to their daughter dating a woman.

Sabina told me that she stole the book in the middle of the night and went to go see Rebecca a day early to avoid having to explain the book’s disappearance to her parents. Rebecca was ecstatic, of course, and they had a fun night together. I doubt I need to tell you what she meant by “fun.”

When Sabina got up the next morning, Rebecca had been reading the book, almost in a trance. It took Sabina tapping her on the shoulder to get her to look up, and then she put the book aside and ignored it for the rest of their day on the town. I only mention it because that bloody book made it so that she had to stay with Rebecca the rest of the week; her parents pointedly refused to let her back home until she apologized for stealing it and returned it. At least Rebecca seemed to like the book, she argued.

Then, as Sabina told me, it began to go sour. A couple of days into their time together, they were shopping around in an old antique store when Rebecca bought a knife. Now, this wouldn’t have been so bizarre if it hadn’t been a copper-plated knife that cost over a hundred quid. Rebecca cracked some joke at the time about having “something worthy of Sweeney Todd” but Sabina didn’t find it funny. Sabina said that she could have sworn she saw something in Rebecca’s eyes, something dark and sinister for a moment as she looked at the knife. It quickly passed though, and Sabina wasn’t even sure she had seen anything, really. 

Later that night, Sabina had dinner with Rebecca’s parents. Rebecca, oddly, decided to show off the new knife she had bought, and was cutting into some potatoes when her hand suddenly started bleeding. What was odd was that when she dabbed the blood off of her hand with a napkin, there was no cut visible. It couldn’t have been from the chicken they were having with it either, and the knife had been impeccably clean before the meal had started. It had just started dripping blood out of nowhere.

Rebecca decided to put the knife away and get a new, clean one, and the meal continued. They joked about the knife, Sabina told me, saying it was some kind of “creepy omen” and saying that their daughter had better be more careful with a “haunted antique” like that. By this point, she was shaking as she said this. She swore in Arabic, or at least I assumed it was swearing guessing by the worried glances she gave to the street after she did it. It took me giving her another coffee and a few comforting words before she finished her story.

Earlier that very morning, Sabina had gotten up early to go and talk to her parents on the phone. She fully intended to return the book, too, but couldn’t find it where Rebecca had left it the night before. When she got out of bed, she found no sign of Rebecca, only something wet on the ground. She looked down and jumped at the unsightly trail of crimson on the carpeted floor. It seemed to lead to Rebecca’s parents’ room, and Sabina carefully tiptoed there. As she got closer, she could hear Rebecca talking in a quiet voice. Sabina took a deep breath and took a peak through the door.

She was horrified by what she saw. There was blood splatter on the walls, which caused her to gulp. She could glimpse a bloody hand reaching out from under the stained bedsheets, motionless. But what was the most horrifying was Rebecca; she was standing just next to the bed, her eyes wild and bloodshot. She was reading from the penny dreadful she had given her, and as she watched, the blood from the bed began to flow towards Rebecca, almost as if it was drawn to her.

Sabina couldn’t help but let out a gasp, and Rebecca stopped reading. She yelled out, sounding like a raging animal as she swung open the door. When she did, Sabina could see that she was completely covered in blood, like something from a horror movie. It was smeared over her face, dripped from her hair, and pooled around her feet. When she took a step, the blood pool seemed to follow her. 

Rebecca only said one thing at Sabina, and Sabina was sobbing as she told me. Rebecca said that the knives were hungry with a growling voice. Then she began to whistle some show tune as she lunged at her. 

Needless to say that Sabina ran away, jumping into her car and desperately trying to escape. She didn’t even look back, worried that Rebecca might be there in her full-on Carrie look, a knife in hand and ready to kill her too. Once she was a few blocks away, she called the police, and then she drove straight home, getting back just in time to get cleaned up for Friday prayer with her completely-confused family. 

I was shocked, to say the least. I tried to comfort Sabina as best as I could, even offering her my couch if she didn’t feel safe at home. She only sobbed into my shoulder until her father came to pick her up, just as rattled.

A week later, Sabina didn’t come to the coffee house. Considering the scary tale that she had told the week before, I was going to cut her some slack for not wanting to see her friends very often. I texted her back couple of times, but then the phone began to bounce back, saying that the number I was texting was no longer in service.

Seeing as I couldn’t seem to reach her by phone, I figured it would be best to make a house call, finding out her address from a mutual friend of Sabina’s. I arrived at their place to see caution tape around the yard and a police car with its lights on parked outside. I went to talk to the police officer and find out what happened, but then I noticed the figure that was hiding in the bushes in Sabina’s yard.

It was, I think, Rebecca. She looked more ragged, more feral, her curly black hair circling her head like a dark halo. Her washed-out “I love New York” tee-shirt and cargo shorts had some stains on them that were easy enough to recognize. In one hand, she clutched something that looked like a paperback, and in the other she held a bloodstained box cutter. For a brief moment, our eyes met, and I could see that whatever colour her eyes had been, they were now a dark, bloodshot red. 

Then the police officer flashed his torch in my direction, and I lost sight of her for just long enough that when he flicked the light away, she was gone. I asked the police officer what had happened, and he told me that there had been a homicide at the address, and they were still searching for the murderer.

Murderer. The word bounced around in my head for the rest of the day. I didn’t even go out partying with the rest of the girls that night, I was so stuck. Murderer. Not only that, but by your own girlfriend? I wasn’t even sure how I was so sure it was Rebecca, but it didn’t take long for me to put two and two together.

Whoever or whatever Rebecca was, she had killed Sabina and her entire family. And the way she had looked at me before darting away into the bushes, I figured I wasn’t going to be far behind. 

Statement ends.

Well, this one has serial killer written all over it. I heard somewhere once that nine times out of ten, the killer is someone the victim knows well, and this definitely seems like a clean and shut case with no supernatural connections.

That is, until I noticed that there is the matter of the penny dreadful. Considering the rash of cases in this archive that I have been reading that deal with old Leitners, It wouldn’t be surprising for this book to be one of them. That being said, it’s also possible that the knife has some kind of property that drew Rebecca to kill her family and her girlfriend’s family as well. 

Tim is cur-

{door opens, ARCHIVIST gasps}

Christ, Tim! I was just-

TIM 

Sorry, boss. I just got back from doing some work on the Carpenter case.

ARCHIVIST 

Oh, wonderful. I was just recording the statement for that file, as a matter of fact.

TIM 

Great. You can add that the police in Swindon are incredibly unhelpful, saying that their investigation into Sabina Ganem’s death was still ongoing. 

ARCHIVIST 

Still on- They’re still looking for Rebecca?

TIM 

Yeah, weirdly enough. You’d think that they would have gotten her by now, but she’s been remarkably difficult to find, they said. 

ARCHIVIST 

Wonderful. Thank you, Tim.

TIM 

Sure thing, boss. If you’ll excuse me, it’s really late at night, and I have a date to go to.

ARCHIVIST 

Again? Didn’t you have one last night?

TIM 

Yeah, but he was a dud. Some lousy smart-mouth named Marcel. Wanted to talk to me about my job the whole time and well, our job isn’t all that palatable, is it?

ARCHIVIST 

No, I suppose it’s not.

{pregnant pause}

TIM 

Well, I gotta go.

ARCHIVIST 

Yes, right. Please shut the door on the way out.

TIM 

Will do, Jon…er, boss.

ARCHIVIST 

Hmmm?

TIM 

Bye, then!

{door shuts}

ARCHIVIST 

Ahem.

Tim is currently doing some follow-up with the police department in Swindon. It seems that despite it being over a year since the incident took place, Rebecca Bryant still hasn’t been found. After murdering her own family in their sleep and then doing the same to Sabina Ganem and her family the following week, she disappeared off the radar. Just vanished without a trace. 

Despite the occasional murder in the area that honestly could have been anyone, it seems that Rebecca committed her killing spree and then ran off, never to return. Hopefully that remains the case.

Martin made contact with Mrs. Carpenter for a follow-up interview, and he was going to travel himself to visit her until we received word that she had recently passed away in a car accident a couple of weeks ago. 

Elias recently contacted a local group of private investigators to look into this case a little deeper, according to Sasha, who briefly saw them just outside his office yesterday. Whether or not they have anything to add to this case is unknown to me at this time; if they find anything, it will be attached to this statement for future researchers.

End recording.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for the read! 
> 
> There is also an image of Rebecca as drawn by yours truly! Go to my tumblr (https://helge-doppler.tumblr.com/post/620193758226628608/statement-of-valerie-carpenter-regarding-the) to view her in all of her bloody glory!


End file.
